Need to reorder a table!

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Hi I need to reorder a list in a table for a friend using a SELECT statement

The table looks like this:

Region    Contact
---------------------
Cape Town        Fred
Cape Town        Joe
Cape Town        Anna
Durban           John
Durban           Mary
Johannesburg     Frank

It needs to look like this:

Region    Contact
---------------------
Durban          John
Durban          Mary
Johannesburg    Frank
Cape Town       Anna
Cape Town       Fred
Cape Town       Joe

Is this even possible to do as Order By would obviously not work?

Posted 16-Oct-12 6:42am

Member 7969484

Updated 16-Oct-12 10:25am

Maciej Los

v3

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fjdiewornncalwe · Answer 1 · 2012-10-16T07:02:00

Solution 1

It is good that you are friends with your instructor. :)
Since you have no logical basis for ordering the data then you are correct that an order by will not work, unless there is another column in the table that you have neglected to show us.
You could examine the UNION statement as a possible way to do this, though.

Posted 16-Oct-12 7:02am

fjdiewornncalwe

Comments

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 16-Oct-12 13:10pm

A 5. It's worth noting that, conceptually, from the standpoint of a user of SQL, a table does not have certain order, so nothing could be re-ordered in the table. The order appears only in a data set obtained via a query.
--SA

Maciej Los 16-Oct-12 16:20pm

Agree, +5!

Maciej Los · Answer 2 · 2012-10-16T10:23:00

Solution 2

Marcus answer is very good!

To "sort a table" you need to use query like this:

SQL

SELECT Region, Contact
FROM YourTable
ORDER BY Region, Contact

Posted 16-Oct-12 10:23am

Maciej Los

Comments

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 16-Oct-12 16:43pm

Apparently, ORDER BY, a 5.
(I would like to know the motivation of the one voted 1...)
--SA

Maciej Los 16-Oct-12 16:45pm

Sometimes it happens ;(
Anyway, thank you, Sergey ;)